50 years later, no signs of girl's killer

Standard-Speaker file photo
Marise Chiverella's body was found in this stripping pit in the Milnesville section of Hazle Township.

Unsolved murders never go away, especially when they involve an innocent 9-year-old girl whose life was snuffed out as she was en route to just another day at school.

It is the kind of crime that bothers police officers all of their lives. Not only is it unsolved but it hits home with many police officers who can identify having children of their own. No one wants to see a young child harmed - let alone brutally strangled to death and raped, tied up and tossed in a stripping hole.

Fifty years ago, that's exactly what happened to Marise Chiverella of Hazleton.

It happened on March 18, 1964 - a dark day in Hazleton because her killer was never caught and brought to justice.

Authorities chased down every clue and every suspect and while there were several suspects, there just wasn't enough evidence to formally charge anyone with the crime.

Still unsolved, it remains in the minds of those affected by the murder of the child.

Anyone living in the Hazleton area since 1964 may be familiar with the details.

Marise Chiverella was, described as a quiet, shy, pretty little girl of about 60 pounds with a beautiful smile by those who love her and miss her.

"It feels like a part of your self is gone," her mother, Mary Chiverella, said five years ago in an interview about the day she lost her daughter. "I think of her every day. She is on my mind all the time."

Chiverella remembers her daughter leaving for school and hugging her for the last time, waving to her and feeling apprehensive about Marise walking to school carrying her cans of food for a charitable feast day observance.

Marise usually walked to school with her older siblings but on March 18, 1964 she told her mother that she wanted to leave a bit earlier, saying she would be OK and not to worry.

It was 1964 and many parents had a different attitude in those days. Hazleton was relatively safe and a good place to raise children and while sending a 9-year-old off to school just three or four blocks away from the school was considered by many parents as a fairly safe routine.

Many people were going to work or school at that time of the morning and there was generally a lot of activity.

Certainly someone forcing a child to get into a car or if the child was protesting it would stand out.

Yet, someone did come along and convince the child to get into the vehicle without a trace of any trouble being reported that morning.

One moment Mary Chiverella was waving goodbye to her daughter as she was getting ready to leave for her own job at Geissler's Knitting Mill. The next moment, somewhere between the Chiverella home along Alter Street and St. Joseph's Memorial School at Fifth and North Laurel streets, Marise Chiverella seemed to disappear in thin air.

Later, a gruesome discovery was made in one of the many strip mine pits near the Hazleton Airport in Milnesville.

Pennsylvania State Police and Hazleton City Police would interview hundreds of people who used that route to their daily jobs or path to school asking if they saw anything - a child holding cans of food, or a child stopping and talking to someone or anything that caught their eye out of the ordinary.

Days, weeks and months passed and now 50 years have passed and no one knows what happened to Marise Chiverella as she walked to school that day.

Her mother said she wasn't prone to accepting a ride from a complete stranger and that she knew better and besides, the little girl was "very shy."

So, what happened to her?

Did she get into a vehicle with a man she knew, someone she trusted, someone she felt safe enough to accept a ride to school that morning, a family friend or relative? A member of the clergy? A child might let their guard down if a woman was in the car. Speculation about all of those scenarios came up all the time in the following years.

Case becomes cold

It was the first time a child sex crime involving murder came up in Greater Hazleton and the word "pedophile" wasn't even being used at that time to describe a sexually violent predator.

Joe Yamona is 88 years old now, but when this happened he was a respected Hazleton police officer and one of many assigned to the Chiverella murder case to assist the state police and help crack this case and remembers it well.

"We worked hard on the case," Yamona recalls. "We went down to Philadelphia to see if there was any connection to the same type of murder of a young girl, but we never received a call back from that police department."

A 9-year-old girl named Carol Ann Dougherty died under similar circumstances almost two years before in Bristol, near Philadelphia. She was raped and strangled, her body found by her father in the choir loft of St. Mark's Church. There wasn't enough evidence to link the two murders conclusively, and that case remains unsolved.

A cold case team of 82 investigative experts from the Philadelphia area tried solving the case in 1993. The team lead by Vidocq Society commissioner William Fleisher, was convinced the Bristol murder was connected to the Hazleton case but again neither case was ever solved. The Vidocq Society is made up of investigative professionals who take on "cold case" crimes using forensics and all of the latest crime-solving techniques to solve murders.

A local man committed suicide before taking a scheduled lie detector test but it was never proven that his death was tied to the Chiverella case. The man was living with a woman on Fourth Street at the time and it is the same street that Marise walked that morning. While being interrogated he said he did not go out that day but was caught in a lie saying it was cold out that day just as police officer Paisley mentioned as he directed traffic that day.

Yamona mentioned Ralph Cameron of the state police, Hugh "Steamboat" Ferry, who would serve as chief of police in Hazleton, and many other officers who have since passed on from the city police department.

One of them, former Mayor James Paisley, served from 1953 to 1973. He was quoted in past stories about the case, recalling that "it was a cold, cold day," and he remembers standing and directing traffic at the corner of North Church and West Broad streets.

But whether it was Paisley or Yamona they all had something in common about this case, it gnawed at them that it wasn't solved, according to Yamona. They had suspects but not enough evidence to charge them with murder.

State, county and local investigators worked diligently and at times the stress got to the police in such a way that Yamona remembers one state trooper having a heart attack while working the case.

The late Thomas Mack, Luzerne County district attorney, called the person responsible for Chiverella's death, "a fiend, a sex fiend," according to Standard-Speaker reporter Chuck Gloman who covered the story at the time.

Remembering Marise

Five years ago Mary Chiverella was eager to talk about her daughter as she continued to think about how she would look now in her late 50s and what kind of a life she might have had if someone did not step in and shorten it.

Chiverella's husband, Carmen, died in 2006. He never knew who killed his daughter before his death. However, Mary Chiverella said her husband knows now, and she believes he and Marise are together.

Over the years Chiverella would catch her husband with tears in his eyes, probably thinking about his daughter but he would never admit why he was crying. He wasn't the kind of man to tell you and he wouldn't talk about her death according to Mary Chiverella.

She remembered Marise as a happy child who would be eager to help anyone out. She wanted to play the church organ and her favorite subjects in school were catechism and spelling.

A childhood friend during her first three years at St. Joseph's, Anita Danko Harris, who lives in Lower Nazareth Township, remembers her classmate as a quiet and sweet girl.

"She was a very, very, nice girl," Harris said, "I think about her every year and especially around the anniversary of when this happened. We still visit the area about twice a year and I remember it like it was yesterday."

She has saved many of the stories from newspaper accounts of how her friend died and she was always wondering how Marise's family was doing.

"It's so heartbreaking for a mother and her family to go through such a terrible event," Harris said. "Marise never gave anyone trouble in school she was just a quiet, shy and very good girl and I light a candle and say a prayer for her on the day it happened."

Mary Chiverella said five years ago her family attends a memorial Mass around the anniversary of Marise's death.

Even though the case is 50 years old, state police say the case remains open and reviewed since murder cases are never removed from the books in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

It is still active but nothing has been added in the way of new evidence in the past 50 years. If anyone can shed light on the information that would lead to the identity of Marise Chiverella's killer they should contact state police at Hazleton.

tragan@standardspeaker.com

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